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And yet...
Robert — (archived)

...Pat Buchanan has been proven right to have opposed the invasion of Iraq from the very beginning. Is it more or less partisan, do you think, to acknowledge when somebody's right regardless of their political afilliation?

The recent nostalgia for Gerald Ford's personal qualities had an undeniable edge to it. The comparisons were unspoken, yet unmistakeable. Buchanan seems to possess many of those qualities, notably honesty and a willingness to accept the consequences; and again, just because he's on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from me, I won't let partisanship get in the way of acknowledging them.

Would I want Pat Buchanan as President? Freaky thought, but then, I could imagine an alternate universe in which I could be guaranteed that he'd always have a strong Democratic Congress to balance him and cancel the ideological extremes, and perhaps his personal character would predominate under those circumstances. In reality, there could be no such guarantee, and I'd judge him unelectable in today's extreme ideological environment in any case.

How about Pat Buchanan for GOP Chairman? Wouldn't it be great to watch somebody like him kick ass and clean house? I know you always assume such advice has a hidden core of treachery in it, but consider that one for a minute on its merits. The GOP is, to put it diplomatically, a bit tarnished these days, and just switching advertising agencies won't be enough to shine it up again. Only tearing it down and rebuilding it will prevent the Republican Party from spending the next 40 years on the sidelines.

Separating Buchanan's character from his ideology is an oblique way of addressing his isolationist views. In their extreme they're certainly not realistic any more. But in a milder form, mitigated by compromise, recent history demonstrates that America would benefit from more restraint in world affairs, and far less of the quasi-imperial ambitions of the "neocons".

The neocon worldview is predicated on the argument that the United States can only be secure if it controls the world and can suppress all of the threats that it contains. The impulse to try and find security through control is every bit as seductive as security through isolation, and every bit as unrealistic. You cannot control more than six billion people around the world. You cannot possibly get all of them to accept our values and and thus accept us as their natural leaders. You cannot overcome the nationalism of others any more than we can accept being dominated by another power. Arguments about our virtues fall on deaf ears when our soldiers occupy another country; people see the reality of force and discount the high-minded words. As they should. It's proper that we be judged by our actions and not our rhetoric. You yourself have argued that we must look behind the rhetoric to the actions; sauce, goose, gander, etc.

I'm not becoming a Pat Buchanan groupie, relax. I'm just acknowledging the good in the man, and holding him up as an example of what I mean by "Classic Conservatives". Within that category, Buchanan's an example of the populist variety. Populist Conservatives are the ones most likely to retain the skepticism of power of all kinds; that is, to remember why we fought our Revolution in the first place. They often come from agricultural states, and they remember how their families were treated by the banks and by the wealthy during the Depression. They learned firsthand that power isn't wielded only by governments, and that wealth is not an indicator of virtue.

Populist Conservatives tend to be social conservatives, and that's what the Republican Party exploited to gain their support. They blinded them with rage by pushing their social buttons, to achieve the remarkable result of getting them to forget that the Republicans represent the wealthy elite that has treated them so shabbily down through the years. When I talk about the GOP's betrayal of its own, that's exactly what I mean.

I can't quite seem to find a natural place to stop, this subject is so open-ended. So I'll just pull the cord and exit the bus here.

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